Sublime

What really fascinates me about people is our capacity to love and hate, as well as how we feel and engage, and our ability to deal with change.

Any schoolboy can do experiments in the physics laboratory to test various scientific hypotheses. But man, because he has only one life to live, cannot conduct experiments to test whether to follow his passion (compassion) or not.

Without the masculine construct of the path, and without the theistic idea of a calling from a masculine god, the idea of the life as a work of art infuses self-invention with the type of spirituality that Max Weber suggested would supplant theism: the substitution of aesthetic judgments for moral ones.

The Trouble I’ve Seen,

Many Theresas have been born who found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity; perhaps a tragic failure which found no sacred poet and sank unwept into oblivion.

On her face I saw that look of constant dissatisfaction, of impatience, which later I would get used to, the ebb and flow of her restlessness became the shape of my working day.

Somerville, near the Cambridge line. The neighborhood was known as Little Lisbon,

L. N. FOWLER